This OP introduces philosopher of science Michel Bitbol (above) through the lens of phenomenology, showing why his work matters for understanding the limits of objectivity and the often–overlooked significance of lived experience in scientific understanding.


Michel Bitbol (b. 1954) is a French philosopher of science whose work bridges quantum physics, phenomenology, and the study of consciousness. Originally trained in medicine and biophysics, he later turned to philosophy and is now Emeritus Researcher at CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. Bitbol is known for his phenomenological interpretation of quantum mechanics, his dialogues with Francisco Varela, and his critiques of reductive materialism. He has participated in the Mind and Life dialogues chaired by the Dalai Lama and has learned Sanskrit to deepen his knowledge of Buddhist philosophy.

The aim of this essay is to introduce Michel Bitbol’s approach to phenomenology in general philosophy.

The Primacy of Consciousness

Michel Bitbol’s approach to the philosophy of mind draws deeply from the phenomenological tradition initiated by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century — and, further back, from Immanuel Kant’s revolutionary critiques of the nature of knowledge in the 1700's. Phenomenology begins from a simple but far-reaching insight: the reality of first-person consciousness is ineliminable, and any account of the world must ultimately be grounded in the structures of experience as they appear to the subject. The field of “phenomenology” takes its name from the Greek word phainomenon, meaning “that which appears.” This reminds us that its starting point is not hidden entities or abstract theorizing, but rather, the way the world actually shows up in experience. Note that this presupposes an observer to whom things appear.

At its core, phenomenology is the disciplined study of conscious experience from the first-person perspective. Think of it as more an exercise in directed attention. It avoids importing external, third-person explanations of the source of experience — whether physical, biological, or metaphysical — and instead turns attention “to the things themselves”: the world as it is immediately given — in lived experience and prior to conscious interpretation or rationalisation.

Its primary method is the epochē or “bracketing,” in which one suspends the “natural attitude” — the habitual assumption that the world exists just as we take it to do. This suspension is not a denial of the world; it is a way of clarifying the pure content and structure of experience without smuggling in our preconceived notions of what it means. The resemblance between Husserl’s procedure and the Buddhist practice of “bare awareness” in mindfulness meditation is not coincidental.

For Bitbol, phenomenology is the real starting point in the quest to understand consciousness, because it reveals something that scientific objectification systematically brackets out or ignores — namely the observer, the scientist, the one who makes observations, draws conclusions, and decides on the questions to be asked. Yet the point runs deeper than methodological oversight. Scientific objectivity does not merely forget the observer; it presupposes the observer as the one for whom objects appear, measurements make sense, and evidence is meaningful in the first place. Before there can be data, models, or theories, there must be a lived field of experience in which anything like a “fact” can show up at all. Phenomenology begins from this pre-objective dimension, revealing the conditions that make scientific inquiry possible but that science itself cannot capture because they are already assumed in every act of objectification.

What Consciousness is Not

As Bitbol argues in Is Consciousness Primary?* consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter in the natural world. (We may infer that other sentient beings are conscious, but only our own consciousness is immediately given to us.)

Pure experience is beyond the level of being and has no essence… It permeates the show without showing itself — Michel Bitbol

Accordingly, Bitbol considers consciousness to be “self-evidentially absolute”: the one domain of existence that is given fully and indubitably whenever it is present. By contrast, natural objects are always incompletely present, appearing only as partial profiles or “adumbrations,” forever subject to correction by further experience. (“It looked square from that angle, but now I’m nearer, it’s plainly not.”) Accordingly, while the fact of experience is impossible to deny, the conclusions that may be drawn from it are another matter.

This asymmetry leads to Bitbol’s central claim: the attempt to derive consciousness from material processes reverses the real order of priority. Whatever is presumed to exist in the physical world already presupposes consciousness as the field in which such ascriptions occur.

From this perspective, the materialist project of locating consciousness in the brain or in neural processes is not just incomplete; it is conceptually incoherent. Like any empirical analysis, it rests on the presumption that what is real is what can be objectively measured and assessed. (Here I am referring specifically to the empirical sciences — physics, neuroscience, and biology — which construct their claims through measurement and intersubjective verification.)

However, the very notion of the objective world described by the empirical sciences is itself a product of selective abstraction — what Bitbol calls the end-product of the procedure of objectification. Why? Because science methodically brackets out the subjective pole of observation so as to arrive at an intersubjective consensus about the observer-independent attributes of the object. But when this methodology is applied to the question of the nature of consciousness, it turns around and tries to explain conscious experience in terms of that consensus.

The result is not only circular but, he says, will always culminate in the notorious “hard problem”: consciousness treated as if it were something that emerges from structural relations in objectively–existing matter, when in reality it is the precondition for identifying those relations in the first place. In that sense, it is prior to the emergence of both objective and subjective, which themselves rely on distinctions that arise within consciousness.

Not Something, Not Nothing

Bitbol opens his essay with one of the most disarming lines in the philosophy of mind: sensation is “not a something, but not a nothing either”. This deliberate paradox, borrowed from Wittgenstein, is not a rhetorical flourish but the key to Bitbol’s approach. On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which, as we have seen, are open to correction by further experience.

But if consciousness is not a “something,” it is also not a “nothing.” It is neither a useful fiction, nor a byproduct of neural processes, nor a ghostly residue awaiting physical explanation. Instead, says Bitbol, it is the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise (here the convergence with Kant is manifest). Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. The world of objects may be doubted, corrected, or revised; but the presence of experience itself, here and now, cannot be disconfirmed. In this sense, consciousness is “absolute,” not as a metaphysical substance (which phenomenology rejects) but as the unavoidable ground of meaning, evidence, and world-hood.

There is no world without consciousness, though consciousness is not a thing in the world — Michel Bitbol

The Framing Problem

From the above, it can be seen that the error of materialism is that it applies categories developed for describing objects in a domain that does not, itself, comprise objects and forces. The vocabulary of physical science — process, function, mechanism, identity, information — presupposes an already existing domain of publicly observable entities and regularities. To say that consciousness is or arises from neural activity is to employ terms that belong to the logic of object-identity: the identity of two things available from the outside.

But consciousness does not appear from the outside. It is the medium within which anything like “outside” and “inside” is first constituted. Trying to subsume it under object-concepts therefore involves a quiet category mistake. It forces consciousness into a conceptual grid that cannot accommodate its defining characteristics — characteristics always assumed, yet rarely noticed. Bitbol’s point is not that materialism is wrong in its domain, but that it becomes inappropriate — and conceptually unstable — when extended to the nature of conscious experience.

It is, in short, a framing problem: a powerful conceptual frame applied to the wrong kind of subject–matter.

Conclusion

Taken together, these considerations establish the central thrust of Bitbol’s phenomenology: the attempt to explain consciousness in terms of a physical world existing independently of the mind rests on a confusion about the order of dependence. Conscious experience is not a phenomenon among others. It is that in and to which the very distinction between “phenomenon” and “object,” “inner” and “outer,” first take shape. The attempt to frame the question in physical terms does not so much deny this as forget it. It applies a conceptual framework designed for analysing public objects to something that is not a public object at all. The resulting puzzles — the Hard Problem most of all — arise not from the mysteriousness of consciousness, but from the misapplication of categories that cannot, by design, encompass them.

Bitbol’s alternative is not a metaphysical theory but a reframing: a return to the primacy of lived experience as the ground of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Far from undermining science, this reorientation clarifies its proper domain. Physics, biology, and neuroscience describe the structural, relational, and functional aspects of the world-as-object; they do not, and need not, account for the presence of the world-as-experienced. As such, consciousness is not something over and above the world, nor something inside it. It is the condition for there being a world at all.

This concludes the brief introduction to Michel Bitbol’s phenomenology.

* Originally published on Philosophy Today (Medium) - access via friend link without requiring registration. See Medium version for footnotes and bibliography.